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Robin Andersen, "The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel's Genocide in Gaza" (OR Books, 2026)
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Robin Anderson
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Susie Roy
hello and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. I'm Susie Roy and I'm your host for Today. In this episode, we will be discussing Robin Anderson's latest book, the Complicit US Media Coverage of Israel's Genocide in Gaza. It's a forensic and thorough examination of how establishment media totally abandoned journalistic integrity in order to manufacture consent for the genocide in Gaza, creating an environment in which unprecedented escalations and war crimes have come to form a terrifyingly new normal. Since October 7th in 2023, the world has watched as the story of what was to become the genocide in Gaza was immediately shaped by the mobilization of a very particular narrative, one of unprovoked terror of Israel's right to defend itself, of a war between supposed equals. What was not made clear, and what Anderson's book documents in meticulous detail, was the extent to which those attacks would be used by Western elites and the US legacy media to condone a full scale genocide, including horrors that continue as this book goes into print and despite a ceasefire. The Complicit Lens is published by OR Books in collaboration with the Institute for Palestine Studies and features an introduction by Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, who writes this book does not make for easy reading. Anderson walks us through the mainstream media's misleading coverage, its bland and unquestioning repetition of lies and distortions by spokespersons for the Israeli and US governments, and its racist defamation of the Palestinians when it's not ignoring their voices entirely. In analyzing the stere election of the most basic duties of journalists, she offers detailed alternative and independent media accounts of Israel's massacres, its intentional destruction of the infrastructure necessary for normal life, and its starvation of over 2 million people obscured by the most universal mainstream media malpractice. Dr. Robin Anderson is a Professor Emerita of Media Studies at Fordham University and an award winning author of a dozen single and co authored books. Her work examines film, television and media coverage of war, the environment, politics and elections. She edits the Rutledge Focus Book Series on media and humanitarian action, serves as a Project Censored judge, and contributes to the annual State of the Free Press. Anderson is on the Board of Directors of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting where she also writes regularly and is an Izzy Award Judge for the park center for Independent Media. It's great to have you here, Robin. I'm looking forward to speaking with you.
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Robin Anderson
Thanks for inviting me and thanks for that great introduction, Susie. The summary of the book is terrific.
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Susie Roy
I have to remember that it's a great book and you've written. I'm just going to move into my first question. You've written a book that does something that you're saying in the book establishment media consistently refuses to do, which is provide context, documentation and historical grounding for what has actually been happening in Gaza. What drove you to write this and who did you write this for?
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Robin Anderson
Great question. I wrote it, I think for the Palestinian people and particularly for the journalists, the Palestinian journalists on the ground. So many of them who also worked for Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera is very careful about not losing its journalists. They have whole plans in place. They've you worked on this for years and years as the, the kind of primary and premier network covering the Middle east in conflicts. And so that those journalists have been killed. We really know something very, very different is happening. And recently we just, we just had on May 3rd, of course press Freedom Day. And the latest figures are that 2/3 of the journalists worldwide in 2025 were killed by Israel in Gaza. So I'm so grateful to the Palestinian journalists because the world really would not know what was going on in Gaza without them and they paid with their lives. But what we could do throughout this time is look at the terrible media coverage that was pro Israel and condoned every aspect of genocide with what was actually happening on the ground with people who were living with them, who were suffering with them as the genocide continued, but told us the real story. And there's no way that you can understand what was happening on the ground without seeing the devastation of the 2000 pound bombs that would hit the refugee camps, which of course the New York Times insisted on calling neighborhoods because refugee camp is an international term for an identifying of people who have had been displaced. So those are the people that I'm the most grateful to and that I dedicate the book to. And the way I got into it really was from my colleagues at Project Censored who suggested to me that I write that I write a column for their blog Dispatches, because right away we could see that, that they, the US media was doing terrible coverage. You know, we didn't know who, who was, who was the perpetrator, who were the perpetrators of the bombs. Right. And they were just explosions. And so once that was published and it was kind of the first ones out there went everywhere, I guess I was committed after that, but that's how it happened.
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Susie Roy
That makes a lot of sense. And the role of Palestinian journalists is central to this book. You also write that international journalists were blocked from entering and that international media outlets don't mention that fact. Why do you think this is the case?
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Robin Anderson
Well, cover up, put it in a word, they didn't. They also so rarely acknowledged that journalists were, were being killed and, and their, their peers, their colleagues, their global colleagues were being slaughtered by Israel. We had certainly Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists documenting and, and though they're the ones who organized the research that, that blatant and targeting killing of really important journalists in Gaza. I remember Ishmael Al Gould, he was a young 24 year old, he was online, he had, gosh, hundreds of thousands of followers. And I remember contrasting many of the of the incidents and the massacres that, that I was critiquing the mainstream media of and then having his reporting there to contrast it with, particularly with the Flower massacre. That was in the spring of 2024, where Israeli troops fired from atop the aid convoys at starving and hungry Palestinians. And then the mainstream media followed the different, throughout the day, all these different lies that the talking points coming out of the IDF would tell them. Oh, no, they didn't, they didn't shoot. Oh, okay, they shot, but they were being threatened. Oh, well, you know, oh, okay, they shot a few people and then they put up a few videotapes. And right away BBC verified said, well, this is not a solid tape. It's been edited four times so that we don't know what happened between things. And you had Ishmael Al Gould on the ground writing about how they had divided, how they had divided the Palestinians. And then they opened fire. He went to the hospital where the bodies lay and found that, gee, they're not trampled, they're hit with fire. They've been shot dead. So not to be too gruesome about it anyway, but I guess that's what Rashid means when documented and it's not easy to read. But later, of course, he was one of the incredibly good journalists that Israel targeted and, and, and hit his car with his, with a, with a colleague in it. And other journalists were right around and they saw it and it's all well documented and they assassinated him. To censor those on the ground, to erase the memory and to deny what they were doing. And that's all very obvious in the mainstream media. You know, they would say, oh, they would say, oh, somebody got killed. But, but one of the ways that they did it throughout that, that mainstream media questioned everything by Israel was two things. Oh, that journalist worked for Palestinian television or he worked for the actual, the Gaza Health Ministry or the numbers that came out of body counts. Meanwhile, Israeli volunteer, Israeli hostages were presented as people. We cared about them with a compassionate frame. But the Palestinians were body counts. And it was always from the Gaza Health Ministry, as if this wasn't reliable. Where many people and, or NGOs and, and the, the head of, of the United nations themselves said that this is very reliable information. But it was like a mantra, a media mantra to discredit everything.
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Susie Roy
The Hamas run Health Ministry sometimes, yeah,
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Robin Anderson
Hamas run, Gaza run. They'd like to interchange those. But you're right, they did say Hamas run. At times.
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Susie Roy
It's, it's really wild. And this is going to bring me to a question about your research process for this book, because there's so much conflicting information and coming from like the establishment news media and you're relying on independent journalists, leaked internal memos, human rights documentation, Palestinian eyewitness accounts. How did you approach building this evidentiary picture for the book?
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Robin Anderson
Well, well, one thing is that I've been writing about war for a long time, so that's, that has been woven in and out of, of my writing over, over many years. So one thing I'd like to say is that the, the American public don't, don't have as much knowledge as I do about all of these techniques of, of masquerading that journalists can use. But they also understood it themselves. Right? I mean, so many times before when I've written about war representations, it's been more easy for them to cover up. It's been very interesting with this war where young people particularly had this documentation on their handheld devices and they could easily see what was going on and their kind of natural compassion and moral judgment was brought to bear on the images they saw. And that's how information should be. I used it. There was all kinds of things in my media studies toolkit that I could apply to this, to this coverage based on a history of war media. And what they did was follow many of those things. So the atrocity crimes, right? Well, the atrocity crimes have been around since World War I, and the Germans were bayoneting babies and happily bouncing them off their rifles and all of this stuff. Of course that wasn't true, but that was found to be very effective in mobilizing the Western world against Germany during World War I. That was the birth of modern war propaganda. We found it again in the first US War on Iraq. And that was a Desert Storm with a baby incubator story. So this young woman who had been primed and coached by the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, gave tearful testimony in front of the US Congress about how she saw these 300 babies thrown out of their incubators. And the poor things were on the ground. If you look through the fog of war and through the propaganda, first of all, it was up in a border area in semi rural area of a small country, kuwait. How did 300 babies end up in incubators? Were there that many babies and then premature babies and then really they were thrown out of their incubators. So using the atrocity and the beheaded baby story right away, which caused filmmaker Richard Saunders to say, isn't it interesting that the media is talking about not what Hamas did, but what Hamas did not do. And they did not behead 40 babies. They did not tie them up and burn them in an oven like the Holocaust. Right. So there's all these emotional buzzwords in there that take us back. And they hit our emotional buttons, hot buttons we used to call them and we respond with anger and disgust. And, and well, polls find that people respond more negatively to those kinds of stories than they do to civilians getting killed. So of course you're going to use these kinds of stories if you're a major manipulator and war propagandist and message designer coming out of following any military. And that's what the US Media did. They followed hook. They, they swallowed hook, hook, line and sinker. Israeli hasbara, which is what they call propaganda. And, and using very classic kind of common sense understandings of, of war.
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Susie Roy
Thank you. And I was going to ask you about the Desert Storm comparison because you write that these earlier fabrications, they were eventually acknowledged with editorial apolog were like they had consequences, whereas that's not been the case. The corrective process or the retractive process hasn't really worked. It's been slower or non existent in the case of Gaza. What does this silence tell us about what's happening specifically in this moment?
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Robin Anderson
Right. I mean, and you're right to point out that after the invasion of Iraq and as soon as the war best not like it, not like as soon as the Iran war became unpopular very, very quickly and it was, it was unpopular before Trump even went in, but it took three years for the, for the war on terror and after the invasion of Iraq to be become unpopular with the American public as they understood that, that you know, it wasn't finished and it was very brutal. And so the New York Times and the Washington Post, their public editors wrote apology statements. We're sorry we were not critical enough of the Bush administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9 11. Right. Those were the two justifications for pulling together NATO troops and sanctioning this invasion of Iraq, which was completely unnecessary. And in that war, you know, over, over the years it's estimated that we killed about a million and a half people in the Middle east from the Afghanistan and is an Iraq occupations and all of the, all of the attendant causes of violent death that those things occur. But even when after the baby incubator story was exposed, well after the war actually and these things were exposed, they did have egg on their face. And they did admit it. But it doesn't change the initial narrative. That initial narrative gets stuck early on in people's minds. And so you've got Kamala Harrison, when she was at the Democratic Convention, talking about the rape story, which by then had been just ridiculously debunked by so many levels and by so many journalists. And you have Joe Biden, November and December, even after it was understood that there was one baby killed in the October 7th attacks, and they had her name and they knew that she was shot. One baby under the age of 2 was shot in October 7th. So Biden never saw pictures like he told the American public he had. He never saw pictures of beheaded babies. He never saw pictures of burnt babies that Netanyahu kept telling Biden that he had. So I think I document the book where by November, the Washington Post, even then is telling people, well, at a press conference, Biden, Biden reasserted that he'd seen burned and beheaded babies. And then the Washington Post says, but it's too soon to know if those are verified. No, it wasn't too soon to know that those are verified. They were absolutely unverified, and they had been proven to be debunked by then. So this comes out very slowly. It is still being reported. And so the other thing that is still being reported is that Israel on October 7, that Israel, everything that they were doing in Gaza was in retaliation and against only Hamas. And after every body count, after every massacre, after every killing of Palestinian, so many times the press had this. Again, this media mantra of these things are occurring because Israel is responding to the deaths of 1200 civilians, mostly civilians, during the October 7 Hamas attacks. But of course, it shouldn't have been presented that way. It should have been, this is genocide. And these are the international rules of war that, in fact, they are violating.
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Susie Roy
I mean, so many articles begin with, since Hamas's attacks on October 7, or like it just. That's the first sentence. Often when you begin to read anything, it's so common. So that's absolutely right. And I'll ask you a question about October 7th. You write in the book about how October 7th was immediately framed as an unprovoked act of terror, rather than what it was, which is an indigenous rebellion with a long history of occupation and oppression behind it. How did this framing, this ahistorical framing emerge so fast? And what's the history behind this? Because there was obviously already a way of framing these things.
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Robin Anderson
Great question. Right. So. So also a lot of things that have come out now is that not only did is there's many indications right from the start that Israel knew that there was going to be an attack, not the least of which were social media posts by Hamas which was showing them getting bloody, getting ready and trained on how to do the balloons. Right. There was chatter all over the Internet and Richard Sanders points that out and says, how do we explain this? But what they were very good at right away, which kind of probably aligns with that, is that they had their propaganda in place, they had the frame in place and they immediately incited the world. You had people that, you had the military, the Defense secretary and a Major general saying Hamas attacked Israel. Instead of being appalled, Palestinians in Gaza are celebrating. These people are animals. This is terrible. They wanted hell, we're going to give them hell. There'll be no electricity, there'll be no water, there'll be no food. They want hell, we'll give them hell. So right away this is an announcement that is going to be a genocide. And there's evidence that the journalists kind of knew this. Later, a CNN journalist talking to someone says, yeah, many of us were a little bit worried where these, when we heard anchors, our news presenters simply repeating this kind of language that sounds an awful like, like incitement to genocide as laid out in the South African case against genocide in the International Court of Justice. So, so they knew that had gone on. So there was no pushback, there was no now hold on here. And in fact the beheaded baby stories and the reason that they were, that they were publishing not what Hamas did, but what Hamas didn't do is to push those buttons again, create that outrage and excitement so that everybody, that this, these were the worst terrorists in the whole world. There's no other explanation for war other than these are bloodthirsty murderers who will kill us and kill everybody all the time. Right? So that's, that's a terrorist, right? So, so you labeled someone a terrorist these days and you can do whatever you want to them, put them in jail if you're in the uk, that kind of thing. So Hamas wasn't a resistance movement just like now in Lebanon. Hezbollah was created in 1982 to fight the Israelis first incursion into Lebanon. Right. These are resistance fights, these are not inter settler colonialism. And that's what they were doing. So once you establish that frame where you've got this evil enemy with a violent attack, it encapsulates the narrative. All of the historical flow is no longer considered. Then what you do in this narrative framework is consider what the response to this violence is? Well, Israel already always had a response, and that response was always justified and it was always defensive because of what we said. So that's how the war was initially encapsulated. Encapsulated. And that's how news works in one sense, but that's very much a common standard frame for war reporting in which there's an incident that is either many times faked or an incident that is presented outside of its historical context and true causes. As you point out that Gaza was already identified as an illegal occupation and, and actually an apartheid state.
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Susie Roy
Yes. And it's this kind of. It's this kind of like habitual fabrication that you're bringing up so many examples of. In, in your book, you also related to October 7th. You write about the fabrication of atrocity, and you write about how the sources for some of these articles was this organization called Zaka Z A K A. And how they're not reliable at all. They're. They, they seem like humanitarian first responders, but they're fully in cahoots with the Israeli propaganda regime. Could you tell us a little bit about this and how it fed directly into the New York Times's coverage or a lot of big media's coverage?
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Robin Anderson
Right. Zaka was incredibly important and effective in distributing the worst of Israeli propaganda. They. These were the people that, when the journalists got. Got to Israel, they, they inter. The Zaka representatives would talk to them. And you see many tapes online of Zaka and you see the international journalists standing around and these guys are. There's one particular fellow who was the head of the Southern Command named Yossi Landau. He was very good at fabricating stories. And you could see him on tape. And he pauses because he gets emotional. You know, the whole, the whole performative thing going on. And he says, oh, and I, oh, I saw a woman and the fetus had been ripped out of her belly and stabbed. And then. And then it was all bloody and she was stabbed. And, you know, Haaretz within a few weeks, certainly probably less than a month, had debunked that story. They went to Kibbutz Bari, they said, no, there was no pregnant woman here. You know, things like that. But journalists should have been far more skeptical about these people. But even one of the PR persons in Zaka said, this is so great. Our guys are so effective at talking to the Internet national media. They think it's like an ngo. They think, they think they're like medical doctors. Well, they were not neutral players. They were not. They did not have medical expertise or training. They were not first forensics or first responders in any way. They were an Orthodox Jewish organization in Israel that had actually filed against the courts to not have to do autopsies on bodies. So, you know, there's no forensic evidence about any of the claims of any of this stuff. And yet, and yet you've got the press repeating it over and over because these affected propagandists I also found easily on a videotape of Netanyahu talking to the volunteers of Zaka, telling them, you keep it up, you guys are doing a great job. And it was. They were directly tied to the office of the Prime Minister's public diplomacy office. Right. Hasbara. And they were officially connected to the security forces. So they, they throughout, throughout whatever story it was. Here's the thing about the, the abdication of journalistic standards and professional practices is once you get burned by a source and they've, they've become discredited, one would think that a reliable or professional journalist would not return to that source, that they would say, okay, well that guy was wrong, right? So they returned to them over and over again. The New York Times particularly features Yossi Landau in late December after Haaretz has pointed out that Yossi Landau had a huge influence on many of the atrocity stories promoting them and disseminating to the international press. They return and feature him with a full picture in his article saying he wishes he had taken more pictures, but he was moving too fast. There's no forensic evidence, there's no real eyewitness evidence, there's no visual evidence. So we're supposed to believe that these first responders took no pictures, even though they keep telling us, oh, we've got pictures, they're never forthcoming and they never were forthcoming. So that's the kind of COVID up and failure of the mission of the press to inform its viewers.
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Susie Roy
Yeah, and these are some really horrible lies. They're not small accidents, they're terrible, horrific fabrications. And speaking of the New York Times and the press, in chapter three, you go into a lot of detail about the role of editorial directives and the top down implementation of journalistic censorship. You write, and this is really shocking that an internal CNN memo revealed that copy was being like being sent to the Jerusalem bureau for approval or for censorship, and that the New York Times banned words like genocide, ethnic cleansing, carnage, massacre for being biased. Could you tell us a bit about what was going on here and how this degree of censorship was made acceptable? These are editorial directives from the best news newspapers. Or news organizations.
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Robin Anderson
Right, right. These are our legacy press. These are the very influential CNN globally, the New York Times, the agenda setting paper of record. That's why they were so influential. You're right to point that out. And the New York Times itself has a long history that I read about the next chapter about their bureau chiefs and how they have a very, they've been a long established pro Israel bias in their news. But in terms of the memos. Yes, both, both said don't use massacre. The CNN and the New York Times instructed their reporters not to do those things and so massacre, but only for Palestinians. Right. So in the New York Times, 53 times they used the word massacre to talk about the Israelis who had been killed by Palestinians. Once did they talk about Palestinians being killed by Israeli and use the word massacre. You've got to keep in mind that in the first 25 days, Israel killed 5,000 people. They bombed and killed 5,000 people. And so right early on we kind of knew these things were happening. But the delay in the reporting and the denials and the kind of back and forth, both sidesing, oh well, Hamas says this and the Gaza Health Ministry says that and the IDF says that, but we don't have any verification for any of this. So what they've done is there's no truth. They completely say, okay, we can't know any truth. Well, yes, you can know some truth. You can. As you point out, the sources that I used on the ground, documentation, NGOs, people working on site with Gazans, there's all kinds of ways to refute the long history of Israel lying to the press. I mean, it's long history. Just listen to Chris Hedges talk about the long history of, of the state of Israel lying all the time. And we must have a sense of that now that we're into Greater Israel. Right. So the documentation of those killed should have been reported with the compassion that the killing and the attacks, disproportionate violence against civilians started right from the first day. And that should have been reported much differently. Instead, not only did Israel steal their lives, but the New York Times stole compassion for those killings by discrediting them in every way. And what the New York Times did, I think in general we can say is they banned, if you will, with those journalistic directives. All of the terms that we needed to understand what Israel was doing from a humanitarian law perspective, from a genocide convention's perspective. Any ways these rules have been in place had been in place since the end of World War II developed and established over the latter half of the 20th century. These are easy to find. They're all over the Internet. You can become an expert in international law pretty easily. But the New York Times instructed their journalists not to mention any of these terms that are used to understand what a war crime is and what the rules of war are constantly. And this is well documented that Israel has been very good, good at manipulating international law, for example, by, by saying, oh, we're not killing civilians, we're just looking for Hamas. Oh, we killed a Hamas commander. And, and in, when we, when we killed the, you know, did the strikes in the refugee camp at Jabalia, oh, underneath the hospital of Al Shifa, we completely destroyed it because there was, there was the equivalent of a Hamas headquarters. There was no headquarters. There were never any Hamas in these buildings. These were meant to kill civilians and demolish their infrastructure. And they got away with it over and over again because of these standards set forth by the editors at the New York Times. They crippled their journalists ability to have their readers understand what was going on. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or, or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [37:40]
Susie Roy
yes, and the both side thing standard that you talk about and you just mentioned is leads to like, if you're someone who reads only the New York Times and the BBC and you're not on social media, it's very hard for you to discern and get a clear idea of exactly what's going on or if you're not reading alternative media. So it's a full obfuscation and it's terrible. And you just mentioned the hospitals and this is one of the things that there was manufactured consent in order for hospitals to be destroyed to the extent that they've been destroyed. In the chapter on hospitals you write about preemptive propaganda. So they hit outside the hospital before they hit the hospital itself to build consent eventually for hitting the hospital itself and then destroying it and making it a legitimate target, calling it Hamas Run. There's also this dystopian role played by computer generated animations. Could you tell us a little bit about all of this narrative work needed to start attacking the hospitals and the role of all of these animated like diagrams showing the tunnels underneath to legitimize this?
- [39:02]
Robin Anderson
Yes, Israeli propagandists love to supply audiovisual materials. They love that. Mostly they're very poorly done though. Now al Shifa in November 2023 was the beating heart of Gaza. It was the biggest hospital complex. And the destruction of Al Shifa was unprecedented in modern warfare. They laid the groundwork for that. And yes, I called it preemptive propaganda. Thank you. And they used very, very elaborate for doing that audio visual material. And the videotapes show they're 3D, they're computer generated and they're a fantasy. They emerge from the Israeli imagination. But they know that American journalism, particularly television, loves this kind of stuff, this animated things that actually is becoming more common. Is terrible
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Susie Roy
with AI.
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Robin Anderson
Of course, the nation called it. Well, the thing that most mirrors what this is as an underground James Bond layer. Right. So it went down three stories and it showed these Hamas fighters walking around this elaborate infrastructure. I mean that anyone could have possibly believed this. So the tunnels, there's always tunnels. Did you know now that Hezbollah is being targeted because they're in tunnels? And that's why he's ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon, because Hezbollahs are in tunnels. Well, before that Hamas was in tunnels. But they don't stay in tunnels. Yes, they use tunnels there. It's a guerrilla. There's a guerrilla warfare. They don't have a Pentagon. Under the Al Shifa hospital. The doctors from Al Shifa were, were calling out Reporters Without Borders was sending alerts, stop this. We are abandoned here. They're going to invade the hospital. They had set up for UN observers to come in and look at the hospital to ensure that that hospital was not, hadn't been taken over by Hamas. But once they saw the visuals and, and, and, and adopted this narrative. Well, the other aspect was that, that, that the US government, this, this had Biden's name on it. If there's, if there's a war crime, that is the most obvious complicity of the US Government. This was the one in Gaza where US intelligence supposedly confirmed, oh yes, indeed, Hamas has a headquarters. And we're not going to tell you what our sources are and they're always anonymous, but we have intelligence. So all of it was, all of it was untrue, but it was very effective. So after they destroyed the hospital the first time they went in and by December, that was in mid November, by December, the Washington Post, to its credit, actually did a forensic investigation underneath the tunnels and pointed out that many of the places that Israel had claimed Hamas were, were holding hostages, showed no sign of occupation, that many weren't connected to anything that was remotely mirrored. Their fantasy videotape. And the Rolling Stone was the only one that picked up the story and said that this is unprecedented. But the mainstream press didn't pick it up and correct themselves, not at all. And in fact they. They simply repeated the same propaganda when Israel did, went in it and demolished for good the Al Shifa Hospital in March 2024.
- [43:06]
Susie Roy
Yeah, you said when they went to Al Shifa the first time.
- [43:09]
Robin Anderson
That's important because there was November 2023 and then they did it again. And you know what the purpose was for that massacre? It was to. And really we don't have a good understanding. We don't talk about this much because Israel's way of creating chaos and making Gaza absolutely uninhabitable is to kill all of its police and its civil defense workers and anybody who worked not these aren't. Hamas was the elected government just so that we can remember that. And they were a functioning government and they were paying people to unearth the bodies and look for people under the rubble and supply them with food. That was. They had a civil defense. What they did with the second invasion and complete destruction of Al Shifa and then bulldozing patients and doctors under, under, underneath the. The dirt in front of the grounds of Al Shifa. What they were doing is they killed at least 300 and probably more civil defense workers who would go there on Friday to get their checks from the government. And that's how Israel has gotten away largely with the starvation, claiming that it's chaos because they've also now that there's no Gaza police or security protection to bring in the aid, the Israelis do it and then they also allow their. Netanyahu has been paying armed gangs to attack the aid trucks, claiming that it's lawlessness on the part of Palestinians. And this whole thing is not what we've been talking enough about. The way they have so deliberately and deceitfully destroyed life in Gaza in these deliberate ways that are very, again, unprecedented historically with the destruction in Gaza.
- [44:59]
Susie Roy
And you mentioned Edward Said saying that there's always this narrative of lawlessness and like a typical kind of Orientalist way
- [45:08]
Robin Anderson
of, oh, if you leave them alone,
- [45:11]
Susie Roy
it's going to be chaos. And then trying to create conditions for that to happen. And all of it's really terrifying. And it's still continuing because now they have the peace board and even with the peace board, all their plans are terrifying surveillance state things. And the attacks haven't stopped, even though there's a ceasefire in place. I'm just gonna switch a little bit over now and ask you about the encampments. And in early 2024, there were student encampments all over the U.S. most prominently in Columbia. There were some here in Oxford as well, which you're not gonna see now because of a similar degree of a crackdown. And Rashid Khalidi, I'm gonna bring him up again, describes Columbia after its capitulation as, quote, an anti university, a gated security zone, a place of fear and loathing. So that kind of sounds like dystopian. Could you tell us about what happened in the end with the encampments and what happened in Columbia and why he's describing it this way?
- [46:25]
Robin Anderson
Well, first of all, I want to start by saying that the students, the students at Columbia were so terrific, they were way ahead of any press or any real coverage about the killing of Hindra Job, which, of course, the Voice of Hindra Job was then made into a film which won an Academy award. So on April 1, when they unveiled the ballot, renamed the hall of Columbia, that's been renamed Mandela hall and various other names, they renamed it Hind hall in her honor. She'd been killed at the end of January and this was the end of March that they did. Did this. So. So they knew about it. And of course, the way that they were attacked and justified in the press and that, and that the nypd, you know, came in viciously and kind of went, you know, rioted with violence against them. Is it was they. They. They called it. They called it. There were outside agitators on campus, and these outside agitators were, in the words of our then mayor, Eric Adams, they were influencing our youngsters, and they were violent, and we needed to go in and protect them. So the worst infantilization of students who knew 100 times more about what goes on in the Middle east than that. But. But it was also facilitated at Columbia by a woman who was on the adjunct faculty, who was the counterterrorist informant to the nypd, who had a house, who had an office in Tel Aviv. So this was. This was Israeli plants, if you will, at Columbia. And they created this media frame that then. That then allowed them to go in and say, this is what was happening there. The outside agitator is one of those frames, like the lawlessness frame and the other media frames that we're talking about. So I use that in my media studies toolkit as well as a way to analyze the media. But in the south, the civil rights workers were also. They. They had been informed by outside agitators and communists. That's a common thing. We don't have. We don't have homegrown resistance to what. To what we're ever doing. It's. It's this outside agitation. So. So that. That's how it started at Columbia. And. And Rashid was very right to. And. Well, wait a minute. Let me just. I want to actually say this because these are the words that the media cannot come up with. They cannot come up with words that are humane and contain compassion and are about humanity. So when the ADL guy gets on television on Morning Joe, he thinks that the. That the students look like proud boys or Hamas in this kind of violent, conflictive rhetoric. And really what the students were doing was getting together in, well, not only educational seminars on campus and in their tents and informing each other and enlightening each other and educating one another. They were having ceremonies, they were having seders, they were having, you know, all of these different religious information and rituals that came together and made them. Made a kind of a community of learning and commitment that was happening on campus. And mainstream media simply didn't have the words to express that. But I found sources who did express that, writing in alternative media that called this a Christian community as well. We have plenty of ways that we talk about that kind of nonviolence community organizing that. What we found, for example, is when there are humanitarian disasters, people come together, they talk to one another and help each other. It's about reciprocity and mutual sharing and community aid. And that's what was going on. But they only have this language of belligerence and that. That fits into the worst examples, well, of militarized media that is always confirmed by, you know, the worst evaluations of human nature, let's put it that way. The pro. The students were just amazing. And they were. And they were so altruistic.
- [51:27]
Susie Roy
These safe spaces are then made to seem like really unsafe and dangerous, with outside agitators requiring this kind of securitization. The same thing happened here. We had the encampments out here in Oxford for a long time because the university couldn't do anything about it until they got some court order for trespassing. So now it's on the. It's. The premise is trespassing, so you can't do it anymore.
- [51:56]
Robin Anderson
Well, I want to tell you, going back to Columbia, okay, the first time I talked about the book was on April 7 in a journalism class in Columbia. Well, you know, Columbia was big, open, like. Like Oxford. I mean, you can't close off Oxford, can you? I mean, you can close off colleges, but. But Columbia, we used to be an open campus. Well, now that's all security and you have to show a QR code. Well, I didn't have my QR code, so my publisher and publicist are behind me and they have their QR code and we're standing there. Well, the speaker doesn't have her QR code, so she can't get in. So finally, after about 10 minutes, the guard just said, oh, oh, go on in. But when we got into the J School, there was a big banner for my book and it said, the Complicit lens US Media coverage of Gaza, not US Media coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza. And I looked back at the publisher and I said, did we change the subtitle? And he said, no, we did not. So you can't even use the word genocide now. Even inside a building in an event that's a speaker brought into a classroom, not even a public event, you can't say the word genocide. So that's how the repression is now. And it's the same security. It's the same security software and facial recognition and tracking that they use for Palestinians in Gaza, that they use now at Columbia and other university campuses. And in ice, I wrote a piece that connected Gaza with ice. And it's the same tactical uniforms that ice ICE are using that are used by the idf.
- [53:37]
Susie Roy
That's terrible. And all of the surveillance technology is absolutely linked. Even here is like getting linked with the NHS and everything. It's, it's all terrible. You, I'm just going to ask you a final question before we wrap things up. This has been a really great discussion. You end the book arguing that as legacy media chose to serve as a stenographer to military and government elites, they became complicit in covering up war crimes. Where does this leave us in terms of like the consequences for the future for any kind of journalistic integrity?
- [54:19]
Robin Anderson
Well, I'll tell you, I have this fantasy of my book in the hands of a lawyer at the Hague with certain members of press outlets. And they're have. And they're making, they're calling them into responsibility and account for their incitement of genocide, for their condoning of genocide. You know, just. The incitement of genocide is a war crime. And we can say that they, in many ways. And I would like to see a set of rules actually when it, when it, when mass murder, we don't even need to say genocide. The mass murder is being committed. A set of rules that calls that out and stops it immediately. For journalism. Right, for journalism. You know, theaters of war now with bombs, you know, ever since we Understand that people, civilians in peaceful democratic societies do not like to see people being killed. They do not like to see mass murder. We are generally and essentially anti war. We have to be incited into calling for war. Our angers and shackles have to be made to come up. Yes, and that's why we need to get back to a frame that what my colleagues in media literacy are trying to include, for example, the genocide convention into early education. And we need a whole, we need programs on how to identify and report on rules on the rules of war and the genocide conventions. So we need to do a major overhaul of our thinking. And I think we need to just totally actually uncouple the relationship between media, its digital technologies, its dataization, it's AI technologies, that computer based tracking. We need to decouple them because commercial media and now big tech makes a lot of money on this stuff. And of course they're not going to challenge the audio visual cultural milieu in which their products are making them gazillion dollars in profit. So we've got all the major outlets now owned by the same people that are on the board of directors and the directorates of the military industrial complex. And who do they point out? Who do they pull out right away to talk about, to talk about what's. Well, October 7th, for example. October 7th through 9th, Greg Shupack looked at all the morning shows. What did he find? There was not, there was really almost no way in the early presentations to understand the history of Gaza or to understand the context so that people could understand what was going on and fair documented the number of guests on the morning show to be repeat guests from retired military people either in the Democratic or Republican party, or former generals now invested in the military industrial complex. So there were numerous of these people and there were exactly three people who were invited from a humanitarian perspective and one from a Palestinian perspective. So there's all kinds of ways that these can be pointed out, these can be documented. And we need all of these things to happen. Changes of ownership, changes of regulations, changes in editorial directive. We need to get back to journalism to inform the American public. The media needs to be held responsible for its mission, which is to inform people in a democratic society and bring the truth to the light of day, not be stenographers for a foreign power.
- [58:43]
Susie Roy
And you mention a lot about how there's a different standard even for US war crimes, where you can at least rely on UN reports there. But in the case of Israel and Gaza, you don't, you don't bring up the evidence. Thank you so much for your insights. It was wonderful discussing your book. And for everyone interested, do pick up a copy of the Complicit Lens US Media Coverage of Israel's Genocide in Gaza by Robin Anderson.
- [59:14]
Robin Anderson
Thank you so it was a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks.